Google India partners with three companies for new music search product

MUMBAI: Google India partners with Saregama India, In.com and Saavn.com for new music search product

Google Music Search (India) Labs is a free service. However, partners may charge for additional services that are available directly from their websites. Google Music Search (India) Labs allows you to listen to streaming music online from the partner’s Web site, and does not offer the facility of downloading music directly.

Currently, Google Music Search (India) Labs offers only Hindi songs from India and indexes the meta-data of thousands of songs owned or licensed by the partners to make them searchable on the Internet. Once a user searches and finds the music he or she wants, Saregama.com, In.com and/or Saavn.com will stream the music directly from their Web sites to users’ computers. People can easily search by artist, movie, album or song title.

“Most people unknowingly spend time on pirate music sites and endure a bad experience with pop-ups and malware,” said Google’s Vinodh Bhat. “In delivering a great user experience around music, we have the tremendous opportunity to positively reshape the digital music landscape and help consumers, content owners, and major brand marketers in the process.”

The service enables users to listen to a track as many times as they want – there is no limit on the number of times you can play a track. The thesis is that legitimate distribution through Google Music Search (India) Labs will enable all partners to monetize their content and further market new film releases.

Saregama head Music Adarsh Gupta said “This move is in line with Saregama India Ltd’s., digital strategy to percolate its content for streaming/downloading across as many relevant platforms that come alive. Google is an ideal bridge for us to create a huge number of touch points for content”.

Saregama Web Portal head Jaidev Iyer added “ It is a great avenue for copyright holders/licensees to be ahead of many pirate websites, therefore giving music its due respect and revenues followed by tactical advertising opportunity for music OEM, Telco Music VAS providers.

Web18 CEO Lakshmi Narasimhan said: “We are delighted to partner with Google on a service that is bound to add significant value to the Music Industry and consumers alike. We are confident that this service will enhance consumption of quality and legal music. This is a great step towards stemming music piracy and making legal music more accessible and hence are proud to be partners in this initiative.”